Jerry McCrea/The Star-LedgerA youth walks past a gutted home, an all too common sight along Broadway in Camden. Drugs and violence are steady companions in the city's worst sections.

Stevie Williams trudges along Broadway at 9 a.m., fighting an icy headwind. Unsteady in his stride, he is determined in his purpose: to buy drugs. In Camden, the best part of waking up is a jarring hit of heroin.

The drug trade works in shifts: The morning belongs to heroin dealers; the afternoon to crack and cocaine peddlers; and happy hour, when suburbanites cruise the city after work, is for marijuana.

Williams is on his way to a corner near the Duran Market, a neighborhood convenience store, to buy his morning fix. Above him, the marquee of the Camden Miracle Center promises that God will “deliver them from their destruction.” With destruction all around him, Williams’ deliverance is drugs, and he believes police layoffs — 45 percent of the force — will make his habit easier.

Camden residents see death lurking in thousands of abandoned buildings and in every suspicious alley. Criminals take shortcuts. The rest take the long way around. And even that doesn’t guarantee safety from a bullet, stray or intentional.

By implementing 12-hour shifts and pushing desk cops into patrol cars, police chief Scott Thomson insists he’ll be able to keep the same number of “boots on the ground.” The union disputes this. So, when laid-off cops turned in their badges and guns, they lined up their boots on the sidewalk.

Passersby, unaware of the symbolism, asked if the boots were being given away.

Williams walks the last 100 yards to a dealer — a burly man in a puffy coat and wool cap, who is taking money and slipping packets into the customer’s hands. The dealer isn’t trying to hide his business: Eli Manning is more deceptive with a football. When he is approached and questioned by a curious reporter, the dealer locks eyes.

“You should get out of here,” he says. “Before you get hurt.”

Two blocks away, beneath the three-story high stone columns of the shuttered Broadway Trust Company, Angel — “my name when I used to be a dancer” — paces the sidewalk in sweatpants and a tattered ski jacket. She says she is 25, but looks 35, maybe 40. She could use a trip to the dentist.

She wants one more customer before heading home. Twenty bucks and enough drugs to share will make her your special friend. Cops don’t bother her, she says. “Never have.” Fifteen minutes later, she hops into a beaten-up Honda Accord, which drives off.

A block away, youngsters spill into a playground at the Head Start Pine Street Center. They are protected by towering iron fences.